April 17th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

Mellanox Announces ConnectX-3 Pro Adapter Cards

Mellanox is announcing its ConnectX-3 Pro 10/40 gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with hardware offload engines that are the first interconnect cards to support overlay networks found in cloud environments including VXLAN and NVGRE. ConnectX-3 Pro cards enable cloud providers to build much larger-scale infrastructures without having to rely overly much on CPU overhead. This is made possible since the overlay technologies are implemented within the interconnect hardware itself. Being the first cards to support overlay networks, the Mellanox ConnextX-3 Pro offers the unique positioning of scaling applications and essentially unlimited tenants.

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro Specifications

1us MPI ping latency

Up to 40 Gigabit Ethernet per port

Single- and Dual-Port options available

PCI Express 3.0 (up to 8GT/s)

CPU offload of transport operations

Application offload

Precision Clock Synchronization

HW Offloads for NVGRE and VXLAN encapsulated traffic

End-to-end QoS and congestion control

Hardware-based I/O virtualization

RoHS-R6

Overlay networks are being used to move traffic from VMs using NVGRE and VXLAN which are encapsulated formats. This movement via a sort of tunnel removes the workload from its network address creating an additional layer. The offloads are then performed within the encapsulated formats. The ConnectX-3 Pro cards will decrease costs while increasing the number of ID's possible from thousands to potentially millions. The new cards scale-up without reducing performance or efficiency of the infrastructure. Creating even more flexibility, the ConnectX-3 Pro is compatible with Mellanox's existing ConnectX-3 line of adapters.

Availability

ConnectX-3 Pro is currently available for sampling with general availability arriving in May 2013.